There was a vote in Russia last week, on making Putin president for life. Sadly, it passed.

BUT the govt made a mistake & put all data online Naturally, ppl scraped & analyzed it, as "lib" in @matplotlib stands for Liberty!!

csv:
https://github.com/khakhalin/Sketches/blob/master/ru_vote_2020/cleaned.csv

+Analysis thread(1/7)

Above is the main plot (after Klimek 2012). As both turnout and support were faked, we see a corner-blob emerge from the natural blob in the middle. In RU case, it's also striated, as cheaters go for round percent values. Some by-region histograms below (see 85%, 90% & 95%) (2/7)

Some other interesting regions include Tatarstan (a semi-independent republic in Central Russia speaking a Turkic language: what's the deal with this super-blot in the middle?), and Chechnya (well, you know this one! :) (3/7)

Also note the difference between cities that had active anti-Putin opposition plant themselves at voting stations & document everything (Moscow), and cities where it didn't quite happen (St. Petersburg). Putin would have still won, but there's a huge difference! (4/7)

I also tried to find biggest cheaters by measuring the combness of histograms (compared the freq of %% slightly-above and slightly-below a whole % number), and the prevalence of "lucky" ballot counts that yield a round %. (H0: % were noisified with σ=0.005, n=50). It kinda works?

Not surprisingly, the higher Putin-support, the closer the %% are to a nice round %. (Or rather: the closer it is to the roundest % one can get by dividing two integers, for a given voter list. Say, for 1111 voters, you can't get exactly 95%, but you can 1055/1111=0.9496) (6/7)

Finally, another fun visual is plotting "Pro-Putin turnount" (YES votes / voter list length) against polling place size. Tiny polls are all pro-Putin (either coz they are fake, or coz pollers actually visited old people in their homes). But large poll places go bimodal! (7/7)

Bonus links:
1) For Moscow ppl actually created a BROWSER (!!!), to see now their polling station compares to the rest! Wow data activism!
http://maxkatz.ru/2020/ 

2) The turnout historams are already turned into nerdy oppositionary merchendise :)
https://twitter.com/mpltnv/status/1279449422544482307

That's all. The citation for the main plot:
https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2012/09/20/1210722109.full.pdf

All analyses notebooks:
https://github.com/khakhalin/Sketches/tree/master/ru_vote_2020